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Category Archives: Economics

Since the past “recession” of 2007, every now and then the mainstream financial news outlets mention that the price of gold is on a rise. There will, of course be an expert interviewed who will offer an opinion. Being novice to the “gold business” it is not easy to decide whether the person you listen to is trustworthy or not. And if you start researching the subject you will come across these very convincing sounding people with these “unorthodox” ideas about the current financial and political system and they will have their own, very strong opinions. In this kind of environment it is not easy to decide the angle of the different people you hear and their motives. So I have prepared this post, presenting what I believe to be the four archetypes of those who talk about gold in various media. These four archetypes are those who fall under the stigmatization of “conspiracy theorist”, the mainstream economic advisers, those who actually trade in precious metals and commodities on a daily basis and those who have a vested interest in you buying gold from them. Read more for a more detailed presentation of each archetype.Continue reading →

A quater million mortgage owners in trouble

Many people won’t be able to pay their debts on time even after re-negotiating their mortgages and the upcoming school-start will make life difficult for a number of families.

A quarter million mortgages are in trouble according to the Hungarian Financial Supervisory Authority. This is the number of people who are late with their payments. Almost 100 000 of them are more than three months late with their mortgage payments. The financial institutions have already re-negotiated 130 000 mortgages but many will remain unable to pay on time even after the re-negotiations. The HFSA report warns about the significant weakening of the Hungarian Forint against the Swiss Franc in the second quarter which may lead to an increase in defaults.

The troubles of the debtors is somewhat lessened by the fact that the President has signed a law about legal enforcement whereby there will not be any forced evictions until April 15, 2010. Unfortunately the school-start will make things more difficult and even those who were able to pay on time this far may experience difficulties in August and September. A long term solution for them would be if they were able to convert their CHF debts to HUF using a favorable exchange rate.

According to our analysis, a conversion of the debts using a 170-180 CHF/HUF exchange rate would lead to a stabilization of the situation – says Mariann Lénárd, the head of the Victims of Bank Loans Union to Híradó [Hungarian News Chanel – transl. note].

Following the trends of previous years, the Hungarian banks are making significant profits – over ten billion HUF during the first quarter of this year. According to experts, these profits were not made on loans, but on government securities. The banks will be able to close the second quarter with profits as well although these profits are expected to be smaller since the weakening HUF exchange rate will increase their losses from loans.

The world bank opens up a special site with a Data Catalog which provides download access to over 2,000 indicators from World Bank data sources.

The World Bank’s Open Data initiative is intended to provide all users with access to World Bank data. The data catalog is a listing of available World Bank data sources. This listing will continue to be updated as additional data resources are added. These resources include databases, pre-formatted tables and reports. Each of the listings includes a description of the data source and a direct link to that source. Where possible, the databases are linked directly to a selection screen to allow users to select the countries, indicators, and years they would like to search. Those search results can be exported in different formats. Users can also choose to download the entire database directly from the catalog.

The Independent published an article by Robert Fisk on Tuesday October 6 called “The demise of the dollar” adding weight to the rumors that have been going around about an upcoming attack on the USD by the Chinese.

As a coincidence (or not) the dollar value of gold jumped by around 50 dollars in one day.

Below are some links that deal with the issues and their consequences raised in the article a lot better than I ever could.

Peter Schiff’s speech to the mortgage bankers 2006 is now available in one part. I have previously transcribed the speech in the in its “cut-up” form. So in this post, I have put together all the previous posts. The transcription includes the Q&A section at the end. There are probably plenty of errors in the transcription so please leave a comment if you find one.